The present invention relates generally to locating, extracting and tracking acoustic sources in an acoustic environment and mapping of the acoustic environment by adaptively employing a very large number of microphones.
Acoustic scene understanding is challenging for complex environments with e.g, multiple sources, correlated sources, non-punctual sources, mixed far field and near field sources, reflections, shadowing from objects. The use of ultra large arrays of microphones to acoustically monitor a 3D space has significant advantages. It allows improving source recognition and source separation, for instance. Though methods exist to focus a plurality of microphones on acoustic sources, it is believed that no methods exist for source tracking and environmental acoustic mapping that use ultra large sets (>1020) of microphones from which adaptively subsets of microphones are selected and signals are processed adaptively.
Accordingly, novel and improved methods and apparatus to apply ultra large (>1020) microphone arrays and to select an appropriate subset of microphones from an very large (below or above 1020) set of microphones and to adaptively process microphone data generated by an ultra large array of microphones to analyze an acoustic scene are required.